Saturday, May 13, 2017

Russia-gate was necessary because until Trump was elected, the coast was clear for the murderous US War Industry to declare regime change war on Russia. Russia-gate provides cover for Beltway warmongers, the entire political establishment, who have sold US taxpayer funded foreign policy and American bodies to oil monarchies Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Qatar. Washington Post and NY Times seek to relive Watergate glory days, this time over an alleged computer event which the FBI, inexplicably, never examined, and concerning which no burglers were arrested-Daniel Lazare, Consortium News

Difference No. 1: Watergate was about a real event, the June
17, 1972, break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s offices at
the Watergate Hotel in which five people were caught red-handed in the
act. The fireworks began when the burglars turned out to be part of a
special security operation known as the White House Plumbers.

This is why Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox ran into a buzz-saw in
October 1973. After months of gumshoe field work, he had begun zeroing
in on evidence linking the Plumbers with the Oval Office. This was a
bridge too far from Nixon’s point of view, and so he ordered him canned.

Cox was thus operating in the realm of hard, cold, tangible fact. But
Russia-gate is different since the alleged crime that is at heart of
the scandal – last summer’s reported data break-in at the DNC – is so
far based on purest speculation.No burglars have been apprehended, no
links have been clearly established with the reputed masterminds in
Moscow, while Wikileaks continues to insist that the email disclosure
was not a hack by outside intelligence operatives at all, but a leak by a
“disgusted” insider.

Since the FBI has never conducted an independent investigation – for
as-yet-unexplained reasons, the DNC refused to grant it access to its
servers despite multiple requests
– the only evidence that a break-in even occurred comes from a private
cyber-security firm, CrowdStrike Inc. of Irvine, California, that the
DNC hired to look into the breach.

CrowdStrike,
moreover, turns out to be highly suspect. Not only is Dmitri Alperovich,
its chief technical officer, a Russian émigré with a pronounced
anti-Putin tilt, but he isalso an associate of a virulently
anti-Russian outfit known as the Atlantic Council, a Washington think
tank funded by

the Saudis, the United Arab Emirates, the Ukrainian World Congress,
the U.S. State Department[ie, US taxpayers]

and a variety of other individuals and groups
that have an interest in isolating or discrediting Russia.

Since the Atlantic Council is also a long-time supporter of Hillary
Clinton,this means that the Clinton campaign relied on a friendly
anti-Putin cyber-sleuth to tell it what everyone involved wanted to
hear, i.e. that the Kremlin was at the bottom of it all. If this strikes
you as fishy, it should.

Crowdstrike’s findings seemed weak in other respects as well. A few
days after determining that Russian intelligence was responsible,
Alperovich issued a memo
praising the hackers to the skies.

“Their tradecraft is superb,
operational security second to none and the extensive usage of
‘living-off-the-land’ techniques enables them to easily bypass many
security solutions they encounter,” he wrote. Since the hackers were
brilliant, CrowdStrike had to be even more so to track them down and
expose their perfidy for all to see.

But CrowdStrike then said it was able to pin it on the Russians
because the hackers had made certain elementary mistakes, most notably
uploading a document in a Russian-language format under the name “Felix
Edmundovich,” an obvious reference to Felix E. Dzerzhinsky, founder of
the Cheka, as the Soviet political police were originally known. It was
the equivalent of American intelligence agents uploading a Russian
document under the name “J. Edgar.” Since this was obviously very
careless of them, it raised an elementary question: how could the
hackers be super-sophisticated yet at the same time guilty of an error
that was unbearably dumb?

The skeptics promptly pounced. Referring to Russia’s two top
intelligence agencies, a well-known cyber-security expert named Jeffrey
Carr was unable to restrain his sarcasm:
“OK. Raise your hand if you think that a GRU or FSB officer would add
Iron Felix’s name to the metadata of a stolen document before he
released it to the world while pretending to be a Romanian hacker.
Someone clearly had a wicked sense of humor.”

Since scattering such false leads is child’s play for even a novice
hacker, it was left to John McAfee, founder of McAfee Associates and
developer of the first commercial anti-virus software, to draw the
ultimate conclusion.

“If it looks like the Russians did it,” he told TV interviewer Larry King, “then I can guarantee you: it was not the Russians.”

None of this proves that the Russians didn’t hack the DNC. All it
proves is that evidence is lacking. If all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies
agree that the Kremlin did it, it is worth bearing in mind thatthe
“intelligence community” was equally unanimous in 2002 that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.
If they were wrong then, why should anyone believe that they are right
now in the absence of clear and unequivocal evidence? (On Monday [May 8, 2017], former
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper clarified that the
repeated claim about the unanimous view of the 17 agencies was wrong;
that the report, which he released on Jan. 6 [2017],was the work of
hand-picked analysts from the CIA, the FBI and the National Security
Agency [only 3 agencies].)

So, where Cox was dealing with a real live burglary, all we have today is smoke and mirrors.

For all the self-serving hoopla andmythology surrounding Watergate,
the scandal was ultimately about something important: the dirty tricks
and lawless authoritarianism that were advancing smartly under the Nixon
administration.

The battle is deadly serious. Since roughly 2008, Cold War II has
expanded steadily to the point where it now extends along a 1,300-mile
front from Estonia to the Crimea plus the Caucasus and major portions of
the Middle East. It has intensified as well and would likely have
reached a flashpoint if the hawkish Hillary Clinton had been elected.

But Trump’s surprise victory threw a wrench into the works. This is
not to say that Donald Trump is a latter-day Mahatma Gandhi out to bring
peace and brotherhood to the world. To the contrary, he’s a
loud-mouthed ignoramus who can barely find Russia on the map. But amid
all his confused mutterings about foreign policy, one thing that has
come through loud and clear is his desire for a rapprochement with
Russia.

[Ed. note:The "pro-war establishment"means the entire political establishment..."both" political parties. No political party exists to represent half the electorate which believes the endless war "regime change" racket must end. It's quite serious that the entire political class has no concern for the views of half the American electorate.]

(continuing): "Evidence was dug up purporting to show that he had colluded with the Kremlin. A Democratic-funded memo
by a British intelligence officer named Christopher Steele was produced
claiming that Russian intelligence had a video of him cavorting with
prostitutes in Moscow’s Ritz Carlton.

But it’s all so much hot air. Nothing of substance has turned up. A 1,700-word front-page exposé about Trump campaign aide Carter Page that The New York Times ran on
April 20 was typical. A study in innuendo and unsubstantiated
assertions, it said that the FBI became concerned when it learned that
“a Russian spy” had tried to recruit him during a visit to Moscow in
2013. But then it disclosed that Page, an academic and energy
entrepreneur, had no idea that the person was a spy and merely thought
he was talking business with an ordinary diplomatic attaché with
Russia’s U.N. mission.

It’s a mistake that any American businessman could make, whether in
Moscow or in London or Tel Aviv. “It is unclear,” the Times went on,
“exactly what about Mr. Page’s visit drew the FBI’s interest: meetings
he had during his three days in Moscow, intercepted communications of
Russian officials speaking about him, or something else.”

But one thing that apparently caused ears to prick up was a talk he
gave at a Russian economics institute. The reason according to the Times
is that it: “criticized American policy toward Russia in terms that
echoed the position of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, declaring,
‘Washington and other Western capitals have impeded potential progress
through their often hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization,
inequality, corruption and regime change.’ His remarks accorded with
Mr. Trump’s positive view of the Russian president, which had prompted
speculation about what Mr. Trump saw in Mr. Putin – more commonly
denounced in the United States as a ruthless, anti-Western autocrat.” [NY Times]

In other words, Page drew official notice because he dared to differ
with the orthodox view of Putin as a latter-day Lucifer. As a
consequence, he now finds himself at the center of what the Times
describes as “a wide-ranging investigation, now accompanied by two
congressional inquiries, that has cast a shadow over the early months of
the Trump administration.” So, out of nothing (or at least very little)
has grown something very, very large, an absurd pseudo-scandal that now
has Democrats gobbling on about special prosecutors and impeachment.

But even though there’s no clear “there” there, the Washington
scandal machine has a way of feeding on itself regardless. As Consortium
News’ Robert Parry has pointed out (see “The McCarthyism of Russia-gate,”
May 7), the Senate Intelligence Committee hit Page with a sweeping
order on April 28 to turn over anything and everything having to do with
his extensive list of Russian business, personal and casual contacts
for the 18 months prior to Trump’s Inauguration.

The order thus informs Page that he must turn over “[a] list of all
meetings between you and any Russian official or representative of
Russian business interests which took place between June 16, 2015, and
January 20, 2017…all meetings of which you are aware between any
individual with the Trump campaign and any Russian official or
representative of Russian business interests…[a]ll communications
records, including electronic communications records such as e-mail or
text messages, written correspondence, and phone records of
communications…to which you and any Russian official or representative
of Russian business interests was a party,” and so on and so forth.

Considering that Page lived in Russia for several years, the request
is virtually impossible.It thus “amounts to a perjury trap,” Parry
notes, “because even if Page tried his best to supply all the personal,
phone, and email contacts, he would be sure to miss something or
someone, thus setting him up for prosecution for obstructing an
investigation or lying to investigators.”

It also amounts to a self-fueling scandal machine since if Page falls
short in any respect, the result will be fuel for a dozen outraged
Times and Washington Post editorials accusing the Trump team of covering
up. If the investigation into Monical Lewinsky’s little blue dress was a
joke, this will be even worse, a scandal without end resting ultimately
on thin air.

The more such actions he launches, the more approving such paragons
of democracy will become. With amazing accuracy, the Democrats have
zeroed in on the one halfway positive thing Trump had to say during his
campaign and made it their chief target.

Difference No. 3: Where Watergate was about blocking a cover-up, Russia-gate is about perpetuating one.

Hours after Comey received his termination notice, Ken Gude, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, published an article
calling on the Justice Department to “appoint a special counsel to lead
the investigation into links between the Trump campaign and the Russian
government, and whether there was any coordination between the campaign
and Russia’s efforts to interfere with the election.”

This was very neutral, objective, and high-minded of him. But the question to ask in this instance is cui bono – who benefits?The answer lies in what the Center for American Progress is and whom it represents.

The answer is that CAP is a major Clinton stronghold. Its founder is
John Podesta, who was Clinton’s campaign chairman and whose brother,
Tony, is a registered Saudi lobbyist. Its president is Neera Tanden, a
long-time Clinton friend and adviser.